As people are sensitive when it comes to polls here, questions like "Which software programmes can I use for getting started with ...", "Can you list the items you need to accomplish " or the all-time favourite "what do you think of ..." will go there.

Polls are off-topic on Stack Overflow for reasons of quality. The idea is that polls tend to attract garbage content in the long term. Just starting a separate SE site for them doesn't solve that fundamental problem. As long as nobody figures out how to do polls well and meaningfully, there shouldn't be a site for them.
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PëkkaMar 4 '13 at 19:34

What I like about stackoverflow is that you get quick quality replies from a huge variety of people. Name one platform you can reach the same huge amount of people at. If you need to have a strict "this is not appropriate" filter at so then you need to offer alternatives or people will come back with their broad questions.
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ZurechtweiserMar 4 '13 at 19:37

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No. Stack Overflow needs to do what it does best. There is no obligation whatsoever to cater for anything else.
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BartMar 4 '13 at 19:41

Absolutely not. I wish I could downvote this suggestion more than once.
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Jack ManeyMar 4 '13 at 19:57

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@Zurechtweiser - "If you need to have a strict 'this is not appropriate' filter at so then you need to offer alternatives" No. No, we do not. The Stack Exchange network of sites is a proper subset of all the sites on the internet.
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Jack ManeyMar 4 '13 at 19:58

"What I like about stackoverflow is that you get quick quality replies from a huge variety of people." Explains why that would be good for you (in the short term), but not why it would be good for the site (it wouldn't, we tried it and now we know).
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dmckeeMar 4 '13 at 20:01

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Really? Off-topic? You can disagree with the request (I do, largely for the reasons already stated here), but how exactly is this off-topic for meta?
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Anna Lear♦Mar 5 '13 at 1:56

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@AnnaLear I was one of the off-topic voters. Given that this is not a discussion, but a "feature-request", which is in actual fact really a request for a new site, wouldn't Area 51 be the place? Is Meta really on-topic for this? Because that explains my vote and not some misplaced disagreement.
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BartMar 5 '13 at 6:08

@Bart I think opinions differ a bit on that. I'm usually in the "questions about starting new sites are on-topic here" camp. That said, marking as a duplicate of meta.stackexchange.com/questions/76974/… seems to make more sense than either closing as off-topic or migrating to Area51.
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Anna Lear♦Mar 5 '13 at 15:26

@AnnaLear Fair enough. And the dupe is a nice solution indeed. I just wanted to indicate that it's not an "I disagree with this" vote, which is what sparked this gem.
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BartMar 5 '13 at 15:29

1 Answer
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While I think there should be a little more slack on recommendation questions, the Stack Exchange engine isn't really designed well for polls.

Polls that start with a list and get voted on are useful as a determinant of meta information, but on Stack Exchange, you start with no answers and have them added, so the first answers get the majority of votes and you get a skewed perspective. If you're going to build a poll that way you really need to have no voting until the list is built, but the SE engine isn't built for that.